RadioShack’s new owner plots old comeback strategy

And don't forget the battery-of-the-month club!

That’s what they were before they went out of business.

Micro Center has a terrible selection of Mini Desktop PCs and if some small outlet electronics outfit would start carrying Minisforum and Beelink Ryzen(BGA APU) based Mini Desktop PCs then I'd definitely be interested. But that's provided that I could get the system bare bones and supply my own memory and SSD.

Micro Center stopped carrying the ASRock X300 Desk Mini for any Ryzen 5000G(Socket Packaged) based desktop APU builds, and a very DIY friendly build that was good for there.

And AMD has stopped releasing G series Socket Packaged desktop APUs as there was no Ryzen 6000G or Ryzen 7000G Desktop APUs released! And so that's not good for any DIY Friendly Small Form Factor system builds like the InWin Chopin that can accommodate a Mini-ITX MB but the Chopin lacks the room for any dGPU to fit into the MB's PCIe slot, so small is that InWin Chopin's form factor. So Desktop APUs/SOCs with powerful iGPUs were what the InWin Chopin was designed in mind for there.

AMD's looking more toward OEMs and BGA Packaged APUs only there as some of the Radeon 7040HS series Mobile/BGA packaged APUs in Minisforum and BeeLink systems have been allotted up to 70W cTDPs on those supposedly "Mobile" BGA Packaged processors and that's more processor wattage than Ryzen 5000G(65W) was allotted.

But if one goes into any Micro Center their selection of Mini Desktop PCs and and Very Small form factor cases and low profile fans is just awful there. So I'd like a store that wold specialize in small form factor PCs and cases and low profile cooling solutions. And I'm more of a Bare Bones Mini desktop PC end user and I do hope that eventually AMD will offer some newer Socket Package APUs in the future for DIY friendly builds. Micro Center used to carry the InWin Chopin as well but they have since stopped carrying that.

So give me a Radio-Shack like entity that specializes in Very Small Form Factor Desktop PC systems and even Handheld Gaming devices like the Steam Deck and AyaNeo/Other gaming handhelds and all the accessories and do it yourself upgrade kits there.

I knew when I moved from AZ to NC I was going to miss Fry's (RIP), I should have checked to see if there were any micro centers within a 50 mile radius when trying to figure out where to move.

Well yeah, but back 15 years ago, it was $40 a board minimum copies 3 (or maybe $5 per board with $100 non-recurring engineering fee for a 2-layer board). Back when Radio Shack was big, people were doing hand-crafted PCBs by drawing out your traces with a permanent market and manually drilling holes into PCB-stock.

> I really wish wire wrap was still common. Wire wrap was actually more durable and reliable than PCBs, and for a lot of hobby projects would be easier and faster than designing a PCB and having it made. I wonder if there is a big enough hobbyist market for a wire wrap revival?

Wire wrap's main problem is that the wire-wrap sockets needed to make good, reliable contacts, are on the order of $1 each, so if you need to put like 5 chips on a board, you're well into "Might as well make a full custom 4-layer PCB", especially when you consider that SMT parts are so much more common these days.

But if you wanna talk Wire Wrap...

https://www.peconnectors.com/wire-wrap-sockets-and-headers/

https://www.vectorelect.com/terminals-wire-wrap.html

I know how to do that for sure. But... with PCBs so incredibly cheap these days, why bother? Its not like the $150+ days for a PCB, where $1 per socket, $10 wire-wrap boards and $0.10 per pin wire-wrap terminals were much cheaper than PCBs.

Today, its probably cheaper to order a PCB (even 3x copies) for $20 or whatever, and then throw away the other 2 copies, rather than getting into wire-wrap. The main benefit of wire-wrap is that if you've got a large collection of PCB parts + wire-wrap sockets, you can design and build a board today without waiting on stuff. But I wouldn't consider the wire-wrap way to be much cheaper.

--------------------

SMT for the most part has taken over through-hole in general (including wire-wrap). There's SMT-to-through hole stock boards you can keep, but I feel like learning KiCAD and just spending the $20 each time you wanna make a proper SMT board is the better idea.

The only exception is that through-hole can be built with stock parts in a "prestocked lab". If you want a "resistor book", a through-hole set of resistors + pre-made breadboard proto-boards is a good tool (especially if you have transistors, LEDs, Diodes, voltage regulators, and OpAmps).

You can solve a lot of problems by just combining simple things in a lab in half-an-hour... and then a few wires here and there to connect your doo-hicky to an Arduino or something is useful. Through hole remains a useful tool, although it'd be expensive to stock enough parts (resistor book, capacitor book, some trim-pots, LEDs, voltage regulators of various kinds, a few microcontrollers, breadboards, crimpers, connectors, etc. etc.) to get to this point.

---------------

Anyway, I think the through-hole community has largely settled upon two kinds of boards:

1. "Xacto-knife" boards, like Vectorbord 8019 (https://www.vectorelect.com/8019-1.html), where you're supposed to cut the traces that are too long and make them into individual lines as needed.

2. "Pad-per-hole" boards, like Vectorbord 8003 (https://www.vectorelect.com/8003.html), where you'its intended for you to spill solder between lines that should be connected.

These two techniques are pretty good, but you still need to create wires between points in practice. Wirewrap can serve the job. And arguably, solder+wire is generally considered a bad idea (the solder can internally break before the more flexible copper breaks, so you end up making a less reliable connection than what's possible with wire-wrap)

But you'll find that the amount of opportunity to use wirewrap is still small per project, and it should be "just one technique" for making connections, not the main technique above all else. Soldering is probably the closest you have to a "bread and butter" skill that's used everywhere.